LINEAGES AND LAND BASES FINAL DIDACTICS 750 Hornby Street Vancouver BC V6Z 2H7 Canada Tel 604 662 4700 Fax 604 682 1787 www.vanartgallery.bc.ca lineages and land bases The artworks gathered for this exhibition address differing understandings lineages and land bases presents works from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s of the self and personhood in relation to nature, a concept that is culturally, permanent collection by artists who have challenged the nature-culture historically and linguistically informed. divide, seeking new ways to conceptualize and represent their relation to the world around them while grappling with the troubled inheritance of settler Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim (the Squamish language) has no word for nature, colonialism. At the centre of the exhibition is a case study that assesses the although it has many words that relate to the land and water. Within this intersections between the basketry of Sewiṉchelwet (Sophie Frank) (1872– worldview, people are intimately bound to non-human entities, such as plants, 1939), a woman from the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), and rocks, animals or places, locating subjectivity well beyond humans. In contrast, the late landscape paintings of Emily Carr (1871–1945). The two women were the modern Euro-Canadian distinction between nature and culture provided close contemporaries and friends for 33 years, a relationship also shaped by the foundation, in the early 20th century, for the development of a national the profound inequalities of their time. The comparison of these two distinct, art and identity in Canada. Paintings of vast empty landscapes premised yet interconnected, perspectives both prefigures and extends the critique of an idea of wilderness that effectively erased Indigenous presence from the the separation of nature and culture seen elsewhere in the exhibition, urging us representation of nature at the same time that these communities were being to think anew about the meaning of self and its ties to the non-human world. displaced from their homelands. Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, with Sḵ wx̱ wú7mesh advisors Chief Bill Williams and Tracy Williams Art historians John O’Brian and Peter White argue that landscape functions “as a powerful political unifier. It has helped to consolidate the drive toward national sovereignty, as well as to contain prior Aboriginal claims to land. Through the fiction of wilderness, a fiction that should not be confused with nature’s wild unpredictability or with a condition unique to Canada, ‘empty’ land was declared to be there for the taking—and then it was mythologized” (2007). The artworks in this room all include or allude to a human presence in the landscape and provoke questions surrounding the conventions of landscape art and its use in an essentialized Canadian visual identity. The exclusions produced by the “fiction of wilderness” are here contrasted with artistic assertions of Indigenous sovereignty and explorations of citizenship and belonging for non-European communities, confronting the way in which whiteness is naturalized alongside specific imaging of the landscape. The artworks presented here also engage the figure in the landscape as part of a larger effort to understand who we are as individuals within a larger community, a community that includes non-human persons. Trees feature prominently in many of the works on display as figures in their own right—as signifiers of shelter or displacement, refuge or exile, and as markers of enduring cultural and spiritual relations with the land. In works that fuse personal memory with larger histories, artists in this section of the exhibition search for ways of thinking about our entanglements with systems of exchange, knowledge, belief and culture related to the land. Artists like Patricia Deadman and Ed Pien connect their personal experiences of place to questions of belonging and representation, while Lui Shou Kwan, Arnold Shives and Julie Duschenes draw from nature to conjure symbolic representations of the psyche. Often emanating melancholy and absence, these artists’ works share a rhizomatic framework for engaging and understanding the relational interface between ourselves and the natural world. Describing her works as “nervous systems,” artist Landon Mackenzie points to the interconnectivity she and others seek to access through their artistic production. Marian Penner Bancroft’s graphite rubbings from the surface of her house paired with photographs of a Stó:lō transformer rock— ancestors believed to have once walked the earth, setting it right by changing people into plants, animals, rivers and geological formations, thus binding them to non-human entities and creating a mutual obligation of care—attempt a more ethical engagement with the lineages, cultures and lands that surround her home. This alcove includes audio recordings of three artists in the exhibition, who discuss personal, emotional, affective and consciousness-based explorations of land. The graphic in this alcove is an interpretation of the river system of the Lower Fraser Valley, including Vancouver, made by the Vancouver Art Gallery Design Department The artworks in lineages and land bases urge us to rethink our relation to the world around us by looking to the ways in which we are complexly entangled with it. Artists in the exhibition consider alternate modes to capitalist development and resource extraction, which continue to dominate relations with the environment, choosing instead to draw upon forms of circulation and exchange connected to the generative processes and temporality of the land itself. In so doing, they point to ideas of personhood as being located well beyond humankind and ask us to contend with nature on its own terms. For example, seen here is Cetology (2002), by Brian Jungen, who often reworks prefabricated commodities, such as these white plastic monobloc chairs, into sculptures that address perceptions of First Nations cultures in relation to Western art history, the global economy and the art object. Representing a bowhead whale, a large baleen whale from the Arctic that has a massive bow-shaped lower jaw, Cetology brings to mind museum display and categorization as well as alludes to captive whales in aquariums and the petroleum plastic by-products that pollute their natural environments. Using the ready-made materials of mass production, this work highlights the spectacle and problematics of capitalist tourism and throwaway culture in tandem with the whaling industry. In the Pacific Northwest, from which Jungen draws much of his inspiration, whales remain an integral part of Indigenous life. In this whale sculpture made of disposable consumer plastics, Jungen has created an enduring tribute to these giants of the deep and their intricate dance with humanity. In 1906, Sewin–chelwet (Sophie Frank) (1872–1939), a woman from the Sk–wx– However, Huneault also suggests that Carr’s and Frank’s aesthetic wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), knocked on the door of Emily concerns share certain principles, which are best understood through their Carr’s (1871–1945) Vancouver home, offering her baskets for barter or sale respective worldviews: as a modest livelihood within the city’s burgeoning settler economy. Both Carr’s late landscape paintings, particularly the ones Carr and Frank were born and raised in this region, they both had creative made after 1934, are pictorial statements of her faith practices tied to its lands and waters and they were close contemporaries, that everything in the world was “all connected up.” yet their realities and their interactions with each other were profoundly Her quest as a painter was to capture that intertwining… Her words shaped by the inequalities produced by colonialism. are closely echoed by the teachings of Salish makers: “we have This gallery’s reflection on the 33-year friendship between Carr and Frank learned through experience that everything is interconnected”… arises from Canadian art historian Kristina Huneault’s research on ideas Such beliefs, shared across cultures and down through generations, of personhood and subjectivity that are related to the natural world, and constitute a philosophical bedrock that links Carr’s painting to Salish embedded within the materials and processes of basketry and painting. basketry even as cultural differences have meant that the principle of Huneault’s writing points to the differences between, on the one hand, connection has been understood and materialized quite differently the material products of looking at nature and, on the other, those that across aesthetic practices. result from working with it—a comparison exemplified in the work of Carr —I’m Not Myself at All: Woman, Art, and Frank. Carr’s paintings are a product of looking and are meant to be and Subjectivity in Canada, 2018 viewed—the visual being the most distancing of senses—whereas baskets, which are products of sensuous engagement between maker and material, are both aesthetic and utilitarian. From left to right: In 1913, Emily Carr mounted an exhibition in Vancouver of her paintings with Indigenous subject matter, which failed to garner P’elawk’wia (Margaret Baker) patrons or support. She decided to return to Victoria and gave up painting for the next thirteen years. Struggling to earn a goblet shaped coiled cedar root basket, n.d. living, she produced pottery and hooked rugs that appropriated cedar, cherry bark First Nations iconography for the tourist market. In her 1946 Collection of the North Vancouver Museum & Archives autobiography, Growing Pains, Carr wrote, “I hated myself for prostituting Indian Art; our Indians did not ‘pot,’ their designs were not intended to ornament clay—but I did keep the Indian Emily Carr design pure.” Baskets served as vital trade commodities between Indigenous Not Titled, 1924–30 Peoples before and following contact with Europeans and were used to cook, store and transport food. For Sewin–chelwet Not Titled, 1924–30 (Sophie Frank) and her contemporaries, however, baskets became a primary source of income within the burgeoning settler Not Titled, 1924–30 economy.